I. What is myth?

From Projectmagma.net:

“Myth is a real time tactical game based on squad and unit management rather than resource gathering and expansion. Thanks to a realistic physics engine and meticulous unit balance, gameplay is highly varied and flexible. Your success or failure will be dictated by clear planning, an understanding of the terrain and an ability to mobilise your troops effectively; brute force alone will likely get you killed.

Set against the backdrop of an ancient cyclical struggle, Myth II tracks the progress of the forces of light in an epic crusade for survival. The wild lands and immersive history of Myth—influenced heavily by mythology and literature—provide an exquisite setting for the desperate battle to defeat Soulblighter’s dark minions, and secure the fate of the world.

You can also play Myth online, both cooperatively and competitively. The faithful fan community that has sprung up around the game as a result, has produced an incredible array of 3rd party maps and add-ons that have further extended the life of the series. You can get involved too with the bundled mapmaking tools and community-run servers currently in operation.”

II. How do I play myth online?

Welcome to Myth! First off, we encourage all new or returning players to keep up with the community. We highly encourage joining the discord servers so that if you have any issues during installing or playing the game, you can type a question in the chat, and someone will always be online to help you out, even if they’re not in-game. To reconnect with old players and make new friends, find help, or just look at pictures of Myther’s pets, go ahead and check out the Myth II servers at Discord (With more than 200 members!)

Since this game is about 20 years old, there have been a lot of hubs and sites which offer resources for Myth. It might be a lot to keep up with at first, but it all begins to make sense soon enough!

If you would like to take a look at past tournaments, and MWC2018 Threat Asessments, teams and scheduling, head over to the official Myth Forums at Myrgard! In conjunction with GateofStorms, these two form the core of Myth: The Metaserver and the forums. More on GoS later.

A long standing forum for mapmakers, developers and players worth checking out: The Tain Forums

For Linux, download this file here, and using the Projectmagma 1.8.2 installer for Linux after that as seen in step 7. It requires a bit of messing around, including setting some permissions. Ask in the Myth discord or browse the Tain forums if you’re having issues.

Gate of Storms is the current metaserver for myth. (No more bungie.net, playmyth.net or mariusnet). You’re actually already set up to play on Gate of Storms as a guest user, without having to register. So just open the Multiplayer Game menu, click “Server”, pick Gate of Storms, choose your player name, team and colors, then type in whatever you want in the “Login” field and finally click on the Login button without entering a password. For GoS, your login will be “guest” so type any login that is not registered and leave the password blank. If you are having problems entering Gate of Storms, read this page.

If you’d like to be able to have a custom name no one can use, keep track of your games, or post in the metaserver forums you’ll need to register for an account. You can do that here.

To link it with steam follow the instructions and create a new steam account if necessary.

Use the credentials GOS provides you after you authenticate to login through Myth II.

If you aren’t familiar with how games work already, white means it’s open and you can join, grey means that the game is in progress, and red means that you do not have the plugins or tagsets needed for that game. A new feature in 1.8.2 is that you can join a co-operative game in progress by double clicking a game that is in purple. You will fast forward through the game and catch up to where the players are currently. To Play games that show up as red, you can double click a red game, and then click on the arrow that shows up on the pop-up box which will redirect you to a download. We are still working on a default map pack for the most important plugins.

To install a plugin all you need to do is extract (also known as expand or uncompress) it from the ZIP file it came from and place the files into the “plugins” folder located inside the Myth II folder. You can even place plugins in your “plugins” folder while you have Myth II running, but you will have to restart (quit and open) Myth II for the game to use those plugins. If the plugin file is inside another folder inside the “plugins” folder, the game will not use it. Myth II has a limit of how many plugins it can list. If you have more than 1024 plugins, some won’t be used by the game.

In the above screenshot, the green dots indicate the files that myth will recognise. The red dots are those files myth will not recognise.

III. How do I play myth well?

Now that you have myth installed and working, it’s time for you to be able to play well!

Pyro’s Myth Guide, although a bit dated, is an excellent guide and FAQ on trading, tips, lingo, hosting and more! I’ve summarised a lot of information from his article in this guide.

Optimization and tweaks:

There are some things the generally improve the player experience, and sometimes, skill.

From your myth main menu, click on preferences. Consider checking “Persistent Ready (Multiplayer) and “Long Player List (Metaserver)” and “interface transparency” You may also uncheck “Show control bar” if you’re confident enough to remember what keys you assigned your formations to.

Later on, you might want to reassign keys for presets.

Formations:

Formations are a big part of playing myth well. Instead of the default formations, you might want your long line to be super long, so that a pus ghol can’t get to all of your archers, or you might want to have your box spacing to be very low so you can clump all your melee super tight for fights. To edit your formations, double click on the fear app, double click on “formations” double click on internal formations, and change the distances you want. Once you’re done, hit ‘OK’ and exit out of fear. The next time you boot up myth, your formations should have changed.

Here’s the formations I like to use. Again it’s all up to you and what you use formations for. I use 1 for archers. I use 5 for boxing up melee real tight in a fight, and I use 3 to spread them out during rushes.

There is an error in the Mac installation where Fear does not open through a simple double click. A quick fix is to right click fear.app, click on “Show package contents” and double click the fear executable. Tags should open up automatically.

IV. Appendix

If you wish to play in a LAN (Local Area Network) or a direct connection with someone else, click on the Other button next to the server Myth is set to log on. Then click OK.

To join a game hosted in a LAN, just select it when you see it appear under the Games on the local network area. If the game is not in a LAN but you know the IP address, check the box for Join by Address. A box will appear under it where you can type the address. Then click Join. The player hosting the game can find out his IP address by going to Whatismyip.org.

To host a game in a LAN or internet, just click on the Host a game button. Type what you want for the Name of the game. You can leave the password blank if you wish to allow anyone access. The port Myth uses is 3453 by default, but you can change it if you know what you are doing. Then click Create.